Christopher Columbus, one of the greatest explorers of all time, has become something of a litmus test. If you celebrate the fact that he discovered America and opened the door to one of the most important sagas in world history, you are a conservative. If you think Columbus was a villain, and the European settlement of the formerly-Edenic America was a tragedy, you are a liberal.
President Trump understands that Columbus has become a wedge issue. Thus:
A new statue of Christopher Columbus went up on the White House grounds Sunday that was built using pieces from a monument to the Italian explorer that protesters destroyed six years ago.
The 13-foot, one-ton replica of a Columbus statue toppled in Baltimore in 2020 – then dumped into the city’s inner harbor – was commissioned by the Conference of Presidents of Major Italian American Organizations and is part of the White House’s celebration of America’s 250th anniversary.
Artists retrieved shards of marble belonging to the wrecked statue from the harbor that were used in the recreation – and reached out to the White House after officials in Baltimore refused to put the new monument up, according to the organization.
The destruction of the Baltimore statue was carried out by Black Lives Matter activists, who did little that was good, and a great deal that was evil.
Columbus’s status as an icon of courage and adventure, or as a symbol of racism and exploitation, is very much a live political issue. Here in Minnesota, on June 10, 2020, extremists led by American Indian activists tore down a statue of Columbus that had stood on state Capitol grounds since 1931, when it was given to the state by Minnesota’s Italian-American community.
I wrote about the incident here:
Via Facebook, the activists announced their intent to take down the statue at 5:00 p.m. on June 10.
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Shortly after 5:00 p.m., the vandals tore down the statue of Columbus. A few minutes later, more than a dozen State Troopers emerged from the Capitol and stood around the now-vacant pedestal. No one was arrested. Obviously, the Governor or others in his administration had decided to allow the criminal destruction of the Columbus statue to go forward without impediment.
The leftists’ pulling down of the statue of Christopher Columbus was endorsed by Governor Tim Walz and, most enthusiastically, by Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan:
Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan was even more supportive of the vandals’ criminal destruction of property: “I can’t say I’m sad the statue of Christopher Columbus is gone. I’m not. … The arrival of Christopher Columbus to what is now the Americas set in motion centuries of violence and genocide against the Indigenous people who already lived here.”
That is literally how crackpot left-wingers like Peggy Flanagan view American history. You might ask, so what? Why should I care about a lunatic I’ve never heard of? You should care because Peggy Flanagan is the odds-on favorite to be the Democrats’ nominee for the United States Senate in this year’s election. If she wins what is expected to be a close race, there will be another overt anti-American in the Senate.
So when President Trump erects a statue of Columbus on the grounds of the White House, it is not just a vague patriotic gesture. He is taking sides in a culture war which we conservatives might very well lose–the war over whether America’s founding was a good thing, or a bad thing.
